With the failure of Quake champs, unreal tournament 4, and diabotical in the past decade, I don't think we can blame the developers for not trying hard enough. All three were great games (regardless of how nit-picky the players might be), and all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players.

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mikepurvis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think games that are heavily reliant on online pvp are just always going to struggle with being more niche appeal. Matchmaking is hard to do well and consistently, and managing the skill/progression curve is hard— there's gotta be things in there to master, but also new players will never join if they're just getting stomped every game because they can never catch up.

This tension has arguably been a contributing factor in the collapse of the ARC Raiders playerbase, with a huge population who joined primarily to shoot and loot the robots eventually confronting the realities of a pvpve game, and peacing out for good after getting shot in the back or ambushed too many times.

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ThrowawayR2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unreal Tournament 4 didn't get a chance to fail because it was never a real release. UT4 was a free tech demo for Unreal Engine 4 that never got completed because Fortnite started taking off at that time and developers were deallocated from it.

And UT3 was definitely not a great game by anyone's measure.

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0x1ch an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Twitch shooters are niche in the first place, and it has an even more niche player base that isn't majority American. I think it's a hard sell when 90% of the diehard community built their skill on Quake Live, which comparatively takes far less resources than Champions or UE4. Bethesda then switched the F2P status of Champs and Live, which was not a popular move.

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ZuLuuuuuu 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't forget Reflex Arena!

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baal80spam 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players

This means that they not necessarily were all that great.

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madewithdrama 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They were great examples of what an arena shooter should be. Smooth movement, balanced weapons, well designed maps. The people who had experience with arena shooters liked them. Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.

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TulliusCicero 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.

If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up. Making sure new players actually have fun is a critical part of the game's design. You can't just rely on "...and then new players will have to spend 50-60 hours getting demolished before they start having a good time."

Easing that transition could mean different things -- a campaign, skirmish mode vs bots, full-on PvE co-op mode, automatching that actually works, whatever -- but you do need something effective.

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crummy an hour ago | parent [-]

Splitgate matched new players with bots for the first few hours. It meant I had fun (then eventually I levelled up enough, matched with players, got stomped, and never picked it up again…)

	▲	wmil an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Marvel Rivals quietly matched your team up with bots if you lost twice in a row. I think that was a good system.

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moomin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Only in the rather reductive sense of “the vast majority of gamers are into other genres now”.

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acron0 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It can also mean the market has shifted which is more the case imo.